Report on Citizenship Law: East Timor (Timor-Leste) not (and should not) belong to the political community. For example, the regime’s acceptance of dual citizenship and its lack of absolute impediments on naturalisation by Indonesian residents, while in full accordance with international human rights standards, frustrates the expectations of many Timorese citizens who still resent the Indonesians for the Indonesian military occupation and the Timorese who supported that occupation (many of whom took refuge in Indonesia after 1999). The expectations regarding a restricted access to Timorese citizenship are very high, not only because of a wish to protect the symbolic value of citizenship as a title of membership in the political community, but also (or more importantly) because of a wish to limit access to the material advantage of being entitled to own land in Timor-Leste, which Article 54 (4) of the Constitution reserves for ‘national citizens’. It may be argued that the criteria set by the Constitution need refinement, to better reflect public sentiment about membership in the community and/or to abide by the international law requirement of effective ties between the citizen and the state. However, since the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, to which all other laws and state acts must conform [Article 2 (3) of the Constitution], this refinement can only be made through Constitutional reform, not through a law or a decree. Furthermore, while the absence of effective ties between Timor-Leste and some of its citizens will determine the ineffectiveness of the citizenship status in the international arena, it may not be used by the Timorese authorities to refuse recognition of the Timorese citizenship by birth to individuals who fall under the categories of Article 3 (2) and (3) of the Constitution. So long as Article 3 of the Constitution stays in its current phrasing, any restrictions imposed by ordinary legislation and administrative practice in the access to Timorese citizenship by birth are to be deemed invalid and subject to judicial reversal. 2. Historical Background 2.1. Territory and membership criteria under Portuguese rule The Portuguese are deemed to have arrived in the island of Timor in the early sixteenth century. They found the island divided into two empires: the Eastern empire, under the Bahale emperor, and the Western empire, under the Senobai emperor. This division persists to this day, corresponding roughly to what are now the territories of Timor-Leste and of Indonesia’s West Timor (Teles 2001: 582-583). The continued relevance of the division can be explained by the fact that it was along the border between the two Timorese empires that Portugal and The Netherlands, which had had competing colonial claims over the island since the sixteenth century, eventually agreed on a demarcation between their respective territories, in a series of treaties and protocols signed between 1859 and 1916 (Teles 2001: 572-573). The Portuguese hold of Timor was never strong. At first, the island was mainly visited by Portuguese sandalwood traders and Dominican missionaries. Effective occupation only started in the eighteenth century, with the foundation of the ‘city of Dili’ in 1769, and it took more than a century after that for the colonial domination to definitively spread throughout Eastern Timor. Even then, however, the empire’s interest in this colonial outpost was negligible – ‘the colony was far away, serving rather to exile political opponents and rebels RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2017/7 - © 2017 Author 3